Free Thought Lives

Is Surging Hate Crime in the UK Overcooked?

On August 27, 2016, a Polish man named Arkadiusz Jozwik was brutally murdered in the English town of Harlow in one of the most notorious of many racist hate crimes occurring around Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union.

On BBC News, experienced reporter Daniel Sandford said police thought the attack may have been racially motivated: “The fear is that this was a frenzied racist attack triggered by the Brexit referendum.” In flagging up his report for BBC’s Newsnight programme, John Sweeney, an experienced and respected investigative journalist, described the incident as “post-Brexit rage meets anti-social Britain.”

Jakob Krupa, UK correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, followed up for the Guardian in an article entitled: “The killing of a Polish man exposes the reality of post-referendum racism.” The New York Times joined other publications in reporting that Jozwik was attacked by a gang because he had been speaking Polish in public. Liberal-left commentators and their readers worked themselves up into a frenzy of anger and blame, with LBC Radio’s James O’Brien saying that Brexit campaigners had “blood on their hands.”

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker piled in, saying in his annual address, “We Europeans can never accept Polish workers being harassed, beaten up or even murdered on the streets of Harlow.” It became such big news in Poland that the government arranged to send its own police to the town in order to protect its citizens.

Except it wasn’t true. When the case came to court, it emerged that Jozwik had approached a group of teenagers with a friend after a night of drinking, pushing some of them and apparently throwing the odd racist insult. When one of the youngsters, who was on bail at the time, got up and punched the burly Jozwik in response, he staggered, fell and cracked his head on the pavement. The 15-year old defendant was given three years and the case was consigned to the dustbin of history, with the BBC burying it on a local news page.

This was a genuinely tragic case. Other stories of apparent hate crime around the referendum period are less so.

One that gained similar attention was the daubing of a Polish cultural center in Hammersmith, London, with yellow graffiti a couple of days after the vote—something the center reported to police as a hate incident. Several months later, British newspapers were still reporting that the graffiti said “Go Home,” when it actually read “Fuck You OMP.” As a few Polish speakers pointed out amidst the hysteria, OMP stands for Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej, a Eurosceptic Polish think-tank that had congratulated Britain on its vote to leave the EU.

The waves of sympathy the incident attracted were part touching, part nakedly political. But it was seemingly based on nonsense—an untruth that fitted into a greater, more general, socialised narrative of story-telling; of angels and devils.

As I have written in my book The Tribe: the Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, the belief that these incidents were Brexit-related hate crimes gained such traction because they activated a group of political relations that I call “the system of diversity.” In this instance, the claim that some identity groups (immigrants, Poles) were under attack from certain other groups (ethnically English people, Brexit voters) drew on an established narrative, correctly anticipating a powerful response of support and favour. From journalists in making news and appealing to their editors; from community leaders wanting to raise their profile; and from campaigners wanting to attack their opponents as intolerant racists.

As I write in The Tribe, the system of diversity offers us meaning and purpose, allowing us to cast ourselves as the protectors of victim groups (like immigrants, non-whites, women and LGBT people) from evil oppressors (including the ethnic British or English, white people, men and heterosexuals, or ‘cisgender’ people). Like most identity politics, both in its present incarnation and historically, it is simple, familiar and easy to put into practice. We can ‘roll it out’ across public and even private life, putting in place various rules and punishing those who do not abide by them.

The role of statistics

Statistics have played an important role in establishing the mythology that we are in the midst of a Brexit-related hate crime epidemic.

They offer that special form of modern authority—of apparently disinterested, objective knowledge, of numbers apparently unblemished by an agenda. If these statistics have official status, backed up by implicitly trustworthy, august institutions said to be devoted to accuracy, rigorous standards, like the Office for National Statistics, they bear even more authority.

However, the hate crime statistics, as embodied in this official data, are highly dubious. Reported incidents in the last two weeks of June 2016 (the EU Referendum was on June 23rd) totalled 3,192, a 48 percent increase over the same period in 2015, with the first two weeks of July seeing a 20 percent increase compared to the previous year. Three years on, still hardly a day goes by without an anti-Brexit speech or opinion piece utilising these and related figures, pointing out how they soil the country’s reputation.

The numbers look bad and could partly reflect a real rise. After all, Brexit is fundamentally a contest over identity (British versus European and/or the rest of the world), so it’s perfectly possible that more hateful activity happened between these identity groups during this time.

However, rarely, if ever, do you see a modicum of critical thinking when it comes to analysing this data, and if you take a few minutes to look at how they are compiled, alarm bells start to ring. The College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance says:

For recording purposes, the perception of the victim, or any other person, is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident, or in recognising the hostility element of a hate crime. The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.

It is worth repeating here that evidence “is not required” for the recording of hate incidents or crimes. For the prosecution and conviction of incidents, normal standards of evidence apply, but not when it comes to reporting and recording. Anyone can report anything (or nothing) as a hate incident. You can even report it anonymously. Yet it will be recorded and reflected in the statistics.

This has led to all sorts of confusion and bad practice, spreading out from state agencies into the media and the public. The Home Office report highlighting a surge in hate crime around the referendum described how “the increase” is partly “due to a genuine increase in hate crime”; a half-recognition that not all hate crimes are genuine crimes. However, the report refers throughout to “hate crimes,” rather than “reports” or “recorded incidents.” Of the referendum period it says: “Around this time there was a clear spike in hate crime.” Again, this is presented as an absolute statement of fact. But it supports this statement with the much weaker, “Anecdotal evidence suggests that there was an increase in these types of offences.”

In October of last year, David Goodhart and Richard Norrie compared the official numbers to those recorded in the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which is based on a large survey of individuals and includes accounts of crimes not reported to the police. These figures suggest that hate incidents have been falling sharply over the last decade or so. For the period 2015-16 to 2017-18, the survey results suggest an average of 184,000 incidents per year—way more than in the official police figures, but down from an average of 307,000 each year between 2007-8 and 2008-9.

They add: “It is also worth noting that there has been no marked increase in the number of successful prosecutions for hate crime incidents which have remained around the 12,000 mark for several years and actually fell slightly last year.” In other words, about four percent of hate incidents end in someone being found guilty in a court of law where evidence is required to secure a conviction.

In spite of this, the numbers of reports around the time of the 2016 referendum are what normally get referred to, with nothing about what percentage of these incidents were investigated by the police, or what percentage ended in a successful prosecution. For leading British institutions, politicians and commentators, the apparent surge in hate crimes surrounding Brexit has been one of its core features, allowing them to present the vote to leave the European Union as a tainted and fundamentally racist episode in Britain’s history.

Another reason the official hate crime figures should be treated with caution is because we have good reason to think people were more likely to report hate incidents around this time. I don’t just mean that Europhiles who had persuaded themselves that Leavers were racist and xenophobic were primed to interpret more or less anything they disapproved of through this lens, such as Amber Rudd’s speech at the Conservative Party’s 2016 annual conference which was reported (and recorded) as a hate incident. I mean that the authorities were actively encouraging people to report hate crimes at the time of the Referendum. Labour Party and pro-Remain politicians, such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, heavily promoted the reporting of hate crime in the summer of 2016. Khan’s own office added to the proliferating number of reporting mechanisms by setting up a web page urging people to telephone or send an email about “hate crimes following the referendum result.” Meanwhile, police forces and local councils were busily engaging with “community forums,” encouraging group and community leaders to report hate incidents.

By encouraging reporting, you are likely to increase the number of reports, but that increase doesn’t tell us anything about whether the underlying number of hate incidents has increased. We might call this a version of what The Wire creator David Simon has referred to as “juking the stats”—and it has played right into the hands of progressive Remain campaigners and their allies in the system of diversity.

From the top level of politics downwards, the rhetoric was and remains extreme. During the period of the referendum, Khan used the term “Project Hate” to describe Leave campaigners, encouraging people to criminalise anyone who wanted to leave the European Union. In July 2016, the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup wrote an article in the Observer about the “hate crimes being committed daily on our streets,” called Leave voters “a big bag of snakes,” and said that “civil war is the inevitable consequence.”

Background: police and law

The College of Policing says it holds no information about how it formulated its Operational Guidance or who consulted on it. In response to a Freedom of Information request, it said, “Research, drafts and consultation returns were initially archived and subsequently destroyed as appropriate,” and “no consolidated list of authors and their professional qualifications is held by the College of Policing.”

However, there are some clues. For a start, the document’s “Further Reading” list refers to some sources, almost all dating back to Labour’s period in office. The foreword is written by Dr Nathan Hall, a trustee of the anti-hate crime charity Stop Hate UK. He reveals the important influence of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry that Tony Blair’s first government set up to look into “matters arising” from the brutal racist murder of a black British teenager in South East London in 1993, and which concluded that the police were “institutionally racist.” Here, we find the idea that “all victims should not be treated the same. Rather, they should receive a service from the police that is appropriate to their needs [my italics].” We also find the Inquiry recommending that the police service must ”deliver a service which recognises the different experiences, perceptions and needs of a diverse society.”

From this and other discussions of hate crime in official circles and the media, it sometimes appears that the law should treat some people (often referred to as “minorities”) more favourably than others. Indeed, Dr Hall’s foreword makes this idea of a justice system with different standards for different groups more or less explicit.

Most hate crime law comes from the Labour governments of 1997-2010. In 1998 the first Blair administration created the category of racially-aggravated offences, so that offences in which racial hatred was an aspect attracted harsher sentences on conviction. The second Blair administration added “religiously aggravated” offences after September 11th, 2001, and went on to add disability and sexuality in 2003. Three times, Labour sought to extend existing law on incitement to racial hatred to cover religion, finally getting the Racial and Religious Hatred Act through in 2006, albeit watered down after the comedian Rowan Atkinson led a campaign against the introduction of a blasphemy law and the House of Lords refused to approve the original version.

Labour’s desperate efforts to get something through on religious hatred were largely due to the party’s attempts to win back the votes of Britain’s Muslims, many of whom were alienated from the Labour Party by Blair’s support for the Iraq War. Muslim representatives had been demanding a law banning anti-Muslim speech for years and they are currently making another push to do so by defining Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness,” something that would effectively ban all criticisms of Islam, Muslim leaders and groups that claim to represent Muslims.

The politics here consists of a continuous call-and-response between Labour (and sometimes Conservative) politicians and the self-appointed representatives of various protected groups of voters whose favour they want. And the currency of these representatives is grievance, now rubber-stamped as “hate” by the authorities.

Brexit and the “surge” in reported hate incidents has provided renewed opportunities for organisations representing favoured groups to raise their profile and draw attention to their causes. The Observer began one story on an apparent surge in homophobia with the following words: “The number of homophobic attacks more than doubled in the three months after the Brexit vote, with toxicity fostered by the EU referendum debate spreading beyond race and religion, new figures suggest.” Scroll down to these figures and you find they have been prepared by an LGBT anti-violence charity called Galop. This charity gave “support” to 187 people “who had suffered hate crimes in the three months that followed the referendum vote.” And, as is standard in such stories, they are attached to a campaigning agenda, in this case to redress the imbalance in sentences for assaults connected to a person’s sexuality compared to sentences connected to a person’s race or religion.

The ecosystem surrounding hate crime now includes a proliferation of groups that attract government funding to promote reporting. Intersecting with these we find a number of organisations that purport to fight “hate” itself. Both types of organisation nearly always have strong links to liberal-left politicians and parties and engage in campaigning. However, when contributing to public discussions in the media, they generally find themselves presented as independent, expert organisations, overseeing the moral health of the nation on identity issues and policing the public square.

Hope Not Hate was founded 2004 to fight the British National Party (BNP) but now spreads its wings much more widely. It campaigns against Brexit, encourages young people to vote, and presses politicians to retain unrestricted immigration policies. Its chief executive, Nick Lowles, has said that calling for an end to open borders between Britain and Europe is “morally wrong” and urged all “progressive” organisations to “step up their game” when it comes to opposing Brexit. Stop Hate UK is a state-funded anti-hate crime charity whose chief executive, Rose Simkins, recently blamed pro-Brexit politicians for a doubling of reported hate incidents on the London Underground.

We see here a similar type of slippage in standards that we see in the statistics: a broadening and loosening of boundaries of what can be described as “hate” to promote institutional activity designed to combat it. We see this right across the public sphere.

Hate crime now appears as a political crime, an outrage against social justice. There is a good case for saying that actual incidents of genuine hate crime should be seen in this way. But the loosening of standards has helped broaden social definitions of criminality to the extent that pretty much anyone who does not rigorously observe the favouritisms of the system of diversity is open to forms of social sanction—for example, in finding and retaining work, and in being allowed to participate in public life. Accusing your opponents of causing people to commit hate crimes—or branding them hate criminals—is now a perfectly legitimate weapon against your political opponents and unprotected identity groups, and even, in some cases, a way of expressing hatred for them (but of an approved kind that is not defined as hate). As Brendan O’Neill has commented, it has effectively facilitated “a libel against the nation” following the Brexit vote.

Writing about the criminalisation of “hate” in the United States in the late twentieth century, the academics Valerie Jenness and Ryken Grattet quote the journalist John Leo, a free speech advocate:

More and more aggrieved groups want to magnify their victim status. This is one of the little inter-group truths nobody talks about: The more victimized you seem, the more political leverage you have. But you cannot win the victimization Olympics without lots of plain hard work.

This is one of the striking things about how the British public square has changed over the past 25 years: Progressives have put in a lot of hard work to institutionally and legally embed their way of dividing the world into favoured and unfavoured identity groups. And, if anything, it has become more pronounced under the Conservative-led governments that have been in power for the past nine years.

This is what political scientists call hegemony, and hate crime has become an essential tool for securing and preserving it.

It’s not socialist since it promotes strong power structures and wants to control people’s access to resources. A socialist program favors less hierarchy and an universal access to necessities (including jobs, job security or public speech).

There are many currents on the left that are carelessly mixed when it is attacked, when they oppose each other.

Zanga – you are absolutely correct – socialism is never associated with strong power structures to control citizenry behavior. Just look at the freedoms enjoyed by East Block citizens during the days of the USSR (the KGB were a bunch of pussycats just eager to serve the people), where Russia kindly helped their East German allies build the Berlin wall to keep all those deadbeat West Germans from defecting and overwhelming the socialist paradise of the East. Current day North Korea provides another example, as Rocketman makes sure all his citizens get their 500 calories of rice and meat drippings 5 days a week (of course he gets a few extra calories to compensate him for the extra strain of being fearless leader), and everyone has free speech rights to praise his leadership. And universal access to jobs, free speech, and other necessities certainly explains all the refugee traffic from the Florida Keys to Cuba.

The main advocates for more Big Government Politically Correct policies and the “Diversity” faith tend to come from middle-class student types who aspire to be part of government or quangos that promote and enforce the ideology. It’s a highly lucrative industry.

Zanga, in theory socialism doesn’t require strong power structures and systems of control, but the only place such an arrangement can occur is in Smurfland. In reality, humans are not going to share everything like one big happy family. They need to be forced to. Which requires government power and control. That’s why socialism always turns out the same way.

I guess those Russkies didn’t know what they were talking about, then, when they called the country “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” and its state-sponsored youth group “the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League” (Komsomol), its political party “the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” etc. Leave it to the all-seeing all-knowing wise NP to correct them on that.

And hey, if capitalism leads to economic slavery, then where are my reparations? But wait a minute, by saying that you’re erasing the experiences of brown and black bodies, appropriating their culture, etc. etc.

The epidemic of Hate Crime theory sweeping our justice and enforcement systems with superstition is extremely dangerous. Seeing that the U.K. trains police that “evidence ‘is not required’,” and Hate Crime depends instead on “the perception of the victim;” that is a chilling doctrine.

Hate Crime should be eradicated from law and policing; it’s unreasonable and bigoted, inherently unjust.

Come now James, surely someone is more dead if he/she/zhe/whatever is killed for being black, polish, LGBTQRST, or Muslim than if [insert pronoun here] is killed for money, jealousy, pride, or malice .

No, not more dead. But having sat by my then boyfriend’s hospital bed in St Georges, south London, after a homophobic beating, I have to say it feels uniquely frightening. Are you in a minority group Fred? Any idea what it’s like?

@Tedz
Explain how it was “homophobic”?
are you offering an example of the subject matter of this article?
“Any idea what it’s like?” Having special status that’s above the average citizen, do you mean?

Tedz, what is your frame of reference? Everyone feels “uniquely frightened” when confronted with senseless violence.

I don’t mean to diminish your boyfriend’s trauma, but please don’t diminish the trauma of victims of domestic abuse, rape, and other crimes less prosecuted for political reasons. In a country where thousands of girls were allowed by police to be gangraped for years, let’s keep some perspective.

His “frame of reference” might, perhaps, be influenced by the long and awful history of state oppression of LGBT+ people, and by the continued disadvantage that we are at simply for existing. Hate crimes are more frightening because you know that you have been specifically targeted for an aspect of your person for which you have been targeted your entire life, and which is the basis for the opposition of a great many people to your holding the rights supposedly afforded to all citizens of your country.

I have nothing but compassion for your position. I watched Ian McKellen at the Oxford Union, talking about how people continue to be attacked into the modern age, and I was horrified. But there are two approaches to this problem. The first is to fight for group rights on the basis of gender, sexuality and race. The second is to emphasise our common humanity and pursue a strategy that states that it is unacceptable to physically attack anyone. Of the two approaches, the latter is far more likely to reduce homophobic attacks.

The main reason for this simple- if you drill down into what is the most harmful human motivator, then it is not greed, hatred or anger- it is resentment. It’s the reason why socialism has never worked- because it gives licence for the least successful in society to attack the most productive. It’s why multiculturalism increases racism, rather than reduces it- because it erodes the sense of common cultural identity, and enables a them-versus-us mentality that is toxic for everyone. Common humanity and common national character are umbrella-concepts that protect everyone in society.

In the heartrending example you gave, it could well be that the attack was motivated by drunken, abhorrent, testosterone-fuelled behaviour. But it also might be true that the attacker was a poor, white British male raised in a school system in which everybody’s needs were catered for, other than his. He might have been excluded for bullying behaviour that a generation ago, would have been dealt with by detentions, a demanded sincere apology and gradual socialisation to modern Britain’s rules- but in today’s climate leads to exclusion, criminality and resentment.

And that’s why resentment is so dangerous. Because any grudge or grievance held over a long period of time, is inevitably nurtured, stewed and distilled into anger and hatred. It’s why intersectional feminism is so toxic, because it inherently promotes the interests of one group at the expense of another- which can only lead to divisiveness and resentment in the long run- whilst simultaneously ignoring the true sources of all privilege in this world, having two loving, reasonably well-educated parents from a high socio-economic background.

Are you seriously suggesting that homophobia only exists because of LGBT+ advocacy? That mysogyny is a result of feminism? Any sort of historical knowledge will show you that gay people were being executed and women opressed long before there was any sort of movement in their favour. Mysogyny and homophobia have always existed, and it is only with the rise of political activism that their effects have been reduced.

We can’t help but “fight for group rights on the basis of gender, sexuality and race”, because those are the capacities in which we are being persecuted. To pretend that LGBT+ issues are not limited to LGBT+ people would be ridiculous. And, inevitably, a greater proportion of power being given to women and minorities is going to lead to less power being in the hands of straight white men – that’s an unavoidable consequence of the attempt to build a just society. The “them vs us mentality” was not created by the left – it was created by racists and it is only through actively combating racism, which in this country is a matter, specifically, of white people persecuting non-white people, that we will, eventually, be able to free ourselves of that mentality.

I’m white. I’ve been threatened by blacks. If I get beaten up, does it qualify as a “hate crime”? As a matter of fact, the administration turned its head because the perpetrator was black and I was white (after all, according to the logic of the day, I probably “deserved” it for being white)

All crimes that involve attacking another person qualify as “hate.” That’s the issue with special definitions for protected classes.

Beating on a white Trump supporter. “Hate crime”?

“Punch a Nazi.” (Hate crime?)

The appeal to emotion fallacy does not and should not convince me, Tedz, though I certainly sympathize. Indeed, it feels “uniquely frightening” to be told that due to the errors of one’s ancestors (which isn’t even true in my case) I should just put up with getting knifed in the face.

Great article. Well-researched and informative. It would appear that intersectional feminism now extends to nationality, as well as all the other group identities that the Left claims to champion. Meanwhile, if a white male ends up sleeping under a bridge he deserves no pity or sympathy because he is the beneficiary of privilege, especially by comparison to the back trans woman activist, who has grown up in a loving two parent family, with an upper middle class background. The narcissism involved with this ideology, it’s sheer divisiveness, beggars belief. And, ultimately it will have no impact whatsoever on the truly privileged 10% who really run society- because it is still illegal to discriminate on any basis other than merit, in the UK.

This simply isn’t true. Intersectionalism recognises that economic disadvantage is part of the same problem as racism and mysogyny, and there is no leftist worth their salt who isn’t pursuing policies which will lead to a reduction in poverty as part of the aim of social justice.

There’s plenty of hate crime occurring in the UK, and elsewhere in the Western world, but it’s being carried out by either the left, or their islamic pets, and thus gets ignored by the police, the courts, the authorities, and the mainstream media.

The story about the Polish man that was killed was rubbish from the start. Still didnt stop the usual progressive losers from trying to make hay from it. Im skeptical about just about anything labeled as a hate crime. You basically better have impartial witnesses that saw someone hurl some kind of anti racial language or slur at someone before doing something heinous before I’ll buy it. Non violent so called hate crimes like bananas in trees and random nooses hung in public or racial slurs spray painted somewhere to me there all hoaxes not signs of some kind of race war to come.

Which is tragic really, given Britain’s historic friendship with the Eastern European nations. It’s doubtful whether we would have won the Battle of Britain, without the help of Polish and Czech pilots. Also, the original Enigma machine that all the early work was done with, was captured by the Poles, smuggled to the French and then given to the British. Much of the initial approach to cracking it, was done by a Polish mathematician.

In Britain we have the acronym BAME, which is black, Asian, and minority ethnic. Asians are from the subcontinent, which is India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Those from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Far East are minority ethnic. So too are the Irish Travellers, but not regular ol’ Irish who have been under the English and later British heel for centuries. Poles, Roma, and Romanians are ME. Basically, anyone who is non-white British (English, Welsh, Cornish, Scots, and Irish) as well as non-white Northern and Western European (Scandinavian, German, French, Dutch, Italian, etc) and non-white North American falls under the BAME nomenclature and its legal protections/preferences.

Though the law promises equal protection, enforcement by police and prosecutorial bias skews it in favour of some.

I thought someone would point this out in the comments, but the “English” lad in this case wasn’t white. Why do you suppose the BBC chose not to report that he was black and the target of racial abuse from the Pole?

The BBC were one of the worst when it came to pushing the line that the attack on Joswik was a hate crime following Brexit. When it was shown in court that he (Joswik) was the one who had been guilty of abusing a young English guy during the incident which led to his death there was no retraction from the BBC or admission that they had got things wrong. I think that eventually they published a short, typically mealy mouthed apology somewhere but by then the damage was well and truly done. It is time the biassed, leftist BBC was abolished, as like the EU, it is incapable of reform.

I have had personal experience of the – increasingly widespread and embedded – ‘diversity system’ when trying to get a job.

I applied to the police earlier this year. They sent me a series of automated tests to complete. One tested for ‘cultural sensitivity’.

This test clearly had PC answers and non PC answers. I decided to not play their game and gave answers I thought made most sense from a safety point of view. I failed the test.

I asked for reasons why from the police and the ‘human talent measurement’ company that formulated and ran the test. I alleged that they were clearly testing for bigotry probably so called ‘unconscious bias’. Only the police answered and it was denial.

I have submitted a Subject Access Request on both. Under the GDPR UK citizens have – limited – rights in relation to automated decision making.

The Diversity System is helping to create new social classes: those plugged into this 21st century Matrix and those not. It should be called out at every opportunity.

The application of that word into policy and law means that it is a systematized, legalized and institutionalized system of discrimination against males. Social engineering to achieve equality of outcome goals through discrimination.

So when you hear a politician say “I want more diversity”.

You should hear “I want more discrimination against white males”.

Of course equality of outcome means tossing out any idea of a merit based system. This is why in those institutions that are controlled by ‘diversity officers’ and the left wing in general you see massive discrimination. (ie: universities, BBC, etc.). Specifically, males are excluded from those places.

So “diversity” is overt, fully legal, institutionalized bigotry with a nice cutesy-cutesy name.

Generally speaking there are no ‘assurances’ of anything. The notion of “diversity” is typically tied to employment… hence a ‘diverse’ workforce. As to the objectivity of an individual police officer on their beat the answer is ‘it depends’.

Ever wonder why your female friends get away with warnings while you always get a fine when pulled over? That’s anti male bias.

If you were involved in a domestic violence situation you will always be arrested. That is the Duluth Model of DV applied to society which states that all violence is perpetrated exclusively by men. Combined with a mandatory arrest policy which states only arrest the man. That is feminist bigotry turned into policy.

And may God have mercy on your soul if you wind up in Divorce court with a combative ex. Under the ‘tender years’ doctrine it justifies all kinds of abuse against men. Not only will you not get custody but you will also get child support and alimony payments to make for a long, long time. Failure to pay means prison. Once again feminist bigotry turned into policy.

If you get arrested for any crime expect to be sentenced to more custodial time than a women. The whole system is a racket and has been discussed extensively on the internet. Here’s a primer from ICMI 2016.

It’s not fascism. That word is way overused. This is pure anti-male bigotry… paradoxically introduced by men against men on behalf of feminist lobbyists. Pandering to a voting block by throwing men under the bus. (Men to this day don’t see themselves as a “block”… that could change though…)

It is unsettling and pervasive. I don’t have the time or space here to go into detail.

It’s a rhetorical tool that has been used for years by various groups. Israelis deflect criticism by calling their detractors antisemitic. Any man opening his mouth up about women is immediately branded a misogynist. Anyone criticizing a person of color is branded a racist. A women criticizing a feminist is a self-hating internalized misogynist. A minority criticizing a minority is also ‘self-hating’. White males in particular get the whole enchilada:

It’s simply another way of telling you to ‘shut up’ without actually saying “shut up”. Just telling someone to ‘shut up’ usually invites another two word response so the people who use them seem to think their use of these single word epithets actually constitute an argument. Most people on the receiving end don’t take the time to unpack them so it is actually an effective way to shut them up.

The bigotry on display is also closely associated with the term “privilege”. Another rhetorical tool. That assertion implies that your opinion is a product of something you haven’t earned any right to say. Another way of telling you to shut up without saying shut up. My favorite is “white privilege” hurled around a lot. Being born white is not a privilege, its a demographic. It’s also not a privilege to spend a lifetime working as a corporate apparatchik. It actually requires work, discipline, intelligence and dedication. The folks who hurl the slander around have none of those qualities and live a bitter, resentful life of non-accomplishment.

The author identifies the source of this as “the Left” but that is a very broad term. I’d argue that the rise of these devices was from intersectional feminists who’s views have penetrated societies’ institutions/laws in the last couple of decades. At first their attacks were uniquely directed towards males but now it is metastasizing beyond that. Given the lack of homogeneity in Western society you are seeing it split along it’s ethnic, religious, sex and gender fault lines.

Then there are these ‘hate laws’. As Jordan Peterson said it is precisely the people you would not want to define them that are at the helm of deciding who is a protected class and who is not. This is an abandonment of the idea of the sovereign individual and redefining everyone as a member of a class. The promotion of tribalism and the abandonment of the Western Enlightenment.

Ah well. I suppose the Enlightenment values had a good run! They were born out of a class-based system and it’s an interesting paradox that they are being destroyed by democracy.

Apparently, Jews are in the process of being exiled from the British Labour party. They have too much privilege, a proposal common to much of the Western world as Leftists court the muslim vote, for their coalition. Watched an excellent BBC Panorama documentary on the subject ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’, just last night. Certain Asian groups are also heavily discriminated against by the Left. Just goes to show that it’s success that the Left really hates- because anyone who achieves a modicum of success in life, must have done so at the expense of someone else, right? It can’t be that anyone would want to pay to have the best product or service, in a particular domain.

What’s particularly chilling about the activists, on this score, is just how blatantly racist they are willing to be. So they won’t call someone a Jewish fascist- they’ll call them a zio-fascist, as though they are in charge of the English language, and get to determine when a word is bigoted or racist. It ignores the fact that the term Zionism, simply refers to the belief that the Jewish people should have the right to a homeland of their own, free from racism, prejudice and the historic persecution which has been greater for them than any other people in human history, with the possible exception of the Carthaginians.

So to call someone a Zionist is inherently racist, as it implies that they do not have the right to have all the rights that every other internationally recognised country in the world takes for granted- most importantly, the right to exist. It’s something the activists on the Left aiming to exclude Jewish people are simply too dumb to realise or acknowledge. The other thing they fail to acknowledge is that their vaunted leader has stood on stage, and ‘shared a platform’ with some very unsavoury characters, including leaders from Hamas, and religious clerics that have used language very similar to Louis Farrakhan, when referring to Jews. Now that they are well on the way to expelling Jewish people and some Asians, I wonder who will be next in their cross hairs- either white women or gay men, one presumes.

Whatever happened to the crime of Filing a False Police Report? Unfortunately there are no consequences for filing these dubious reports even when proven false, witness Jussie Smollett in the U.S. Government resources are wasted investigating and documenting these claims. Furthermore false or dubious reporting harms actual crime victims. Using the criminal code to persecute political opponents is evidence of totalitarian thinking.

From a previous post:
“Hate Crimes” legislation has made the accumulation of the correct victims a political necessity.
“Hate Crimes” are unnecessary as an accounting of hate is already built into the criminal code. If hate can be demonstrated it elevates the mens rea to either intentional or malice aforethought. Additionally proof of hate or animus towards the victim’s group serves as an aggravating factor when sentencing a defendant.

Orwellian indeed as the perpetration of the offense is not determine by the actions or omissions of the accused but rather the alleged victim’s interpretation of said conduct. Recall when Biden asked wheel chair bound state Senator Graham to stand. Was Biden committing a “hate crime, incident, faux pas” or just being plain ol goofy Joe?

Here, in the US, we have the dynamic duo of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division run by Bush and Obama holdovers. They have hate statistics on demand for every situation. It’s gotten so that when the news reports a hate crime you can safely assume it’s a hoax.

Going back to the Big Lie, have you ever seen “Inherit the Wind” (1960)? It’s said to be about the Scopes Monkey Trial and those knuckle dragging, anti-science, low church bigots who think the world began about 6000 years ago. It turns out not one word of it is true, not one word. It’s all fiction. The evangelical fundamentalists were the good guys and the text book in question was a nasty bit of overtly racist social darwinism of the kind that was typical of evolution texts from the 1920s.

My guess is these 6 categories of “hate” would account for about 98% of all reported hate crimes, and that the mainstream media and UK government would not be anxious for such statistics to be gathered and reported. In fact, I have to wonder if the UK government would prosecute such statistics as hate crimes.

Amazing. I didn’t realize until reading this article that I was multi-racial – Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, and German. Now if that German part makes you feel uncomfortable, I have news for you: you’re a racist.

If I were to rape someone because they were attractive…
If I were to murder someone that I love…
If I steal from the rich to give to the poor…
If I rig an election so the best candidate wins…
If I pay an official to help my child get into the university…
Love crimes!

The diversity system is wasting our time framing problems the wrong way and offering useless solutions.
But what kind of counter-hegemonic discourse can the conservative spectrum formulate ? You can not simply say “progressives brought it to the table, it was never meant to be, let’s step back and switch to another conversation”. Meanwhile, the situation is worsening and the progressive narrative is gaining more and more credit and audience.
Somehow, you have to surpass it by offering a clearer account of the facts and advocate bolder solutions to negotiate the turn to post-secular and multicultural societies.

To take two examples, talking from a European standpoint, how do you deal with islamic civic and cultural secession ? And how do you deal with the uncivilisation of the disenfranchised white lower middle-class ?

You can not simply frame the islamic question either on a pure security approach, promising emigration to all. Or turn a blind eye and hope that someday, they will chose apostasy and become nice men and women of the end of history, mowing their lawn and indulging in naturism. Somehow, you have to be proactive and invest, with an erudite eye, to harsch but essential questions regarding islâm as a law system and a geopolitical project, and its compatibility with Europe as civic landscape and a definite cultural area. But conversely, you have to engage with religious authorities in building a westernized islamic path for your citizens of islamic background.

Same with the white populace. Conservatives in my country love praising Europe as a singular civilization which must be preserved and transmitted. But they never acknowledge how abstract this notion is to the common lad voting for populist parties. The guy in his post-industrial sinkhole who does not have a clue how much accumulated cultural capital is lying untapped in everything surrounding him. Praising western civilization to the white trash is useless, unless you determine a popular education policy and bypass progressives in the administration and the university to promote better school programmes. But you can not simply laud the merits of the West as it is to historical Europeans. You have to make it appealing to migrants/refugees and descendents of migrants who might otherwise be tempted to fall for the “guilty west” narrative.

In constructing a counter-hegemonic dicourse, the phase of factual rebuttal is necessary. But you do not win the culture war simply with good statistics. You have to construct another grand narrative, that is broader and smarter.

So knowing how you Europeans handle the issues the question then becomes what to do groups of unassimilated foreign cultures some of you invited in to colonize your countries?

So where you stand depends on where you sit on this issue. If you like European Islamic assimilation then read the Koran more often. Get your wife and daughters a head scarf and teach them the rules of the hijab. Some knowledge of Sharia law might come in handy too.

If not then you have a problem. I’d suggest at election time you vote for any party except a centrist or left-wing one. Then somehow you have to navigate through the methods above. Note that option #1 is now out.

Great comment. The grand narrative of the counter-resurgence has to be that the reason why socialism fails, and government always fails albeit to a lesser extent, is because it allocates the wrong people to the wrong jobs, failing almost entirely to mirror the reason why the market is so successful. In the case of socialism, it is simply the fact that the type of demagogues it throws up, and more importantly the intellectual civil service class it creates, are almost always personal failures by every conceivable measure. I say ‘almost’, because it is unclear yet whether China will be able to cordon off their ideological roots and transition into ‘meritocratic autocracy’- but their cultural and historical context creates unique factors- most notably the acceptance of free market capitalism, the cultural placing of stability over liberty and the raising of the family unit above the sovereignty of the individual.

But for Liberal democracies the problem is self-selection towards roles in government that individuals are uniquely unsuited for. The best examples of this are the liberal parole board supervisor and the conservative prison warden. The liberal parole board supervisor is drawn to her role, because she instinctively wants to hear uplifting stories of personal transformation and reform. She may find stories of transformation through religious awakening distasteful, but she cannot deny the power of it to effect real human change. The conservative warden, is drawn to his job because he wants to protect society, his view is once a felon always a felon, and whatever view he may take on reform, his priority will always be more prison officers, doing their job more safely, in more secure circumstances. We know that prison reform can work from the experience of European recidivism rates, and we know conservatives make better gatekeepers, because the conservative character is inherently more threat-aware, dubious and sceptical. So why not ask people who serve in government to try roles they are better-suited for?

Which brings me to my favourite quote: “In heaven: The chefs are French; the police are English; the lovers are Italian; the mechanics are German, and the whole place is run by the Swiss.

“In hell: The chefs are English; the police are German; the lovers are Swiss; the mechanics are French, and the whole place is run by the Italians.”

So in my theory of hell- liberals are drawn to teaching and fail to instil the necessary discipline and respect for authority that is so essential to children learning to apply themselves and go on to live happy, productive lives. Conservatives are drawn to policing and fail to realise that many of the teenage boys and young men they come across, can still be steered away from a life of crime (by diversion programs that emphasise choosing a status-rich life of meaning, over punishment). In hell, college professors are drawn from those with Marxist sympathies, who inherently favour creating activists to preparing young people for life in free market societies. Bureaucrats are sticklers for rules and the experts commissioned to advise government always have an ideological axe to grind. Do any of this sound familiar to anyone living in the West? It doesn’t have to be- all that is required to start, is to begin to advise young people that they might be far more useful and happy, in careers that they wouldn’t naturally think about.

They are essentially correct- BUT. The Europeans spend an inordinate amount of money on social programs to re-integrate offenders. Their employers are culturally onboard with the need to rehabilitate offenders, to keep society safe. A better argument would be that they are cheap and loyal. It’s doubtful whether the US, and Britain to a lesser extent, could achieve their 20% recidivism rates, because we don’t have the same culture. The best that could be hoped for is probably around 30 – 40%, without any other changes.

But, what could completely revolutionise crime and punishment, is the use of the ASPD spectrum (anti-social personality disorder- psychopaths, sociopaths and others) in sentencing and parole systems, beyond a certain threshold of criminality. There are some crimes, particularly those of a violent nature, that are disproportionately committed by those on the ASPD spectrum. I’ve seen some studies that put estimates at around the 70% mark. Or, to put it another way, 50% of all violent crime is committed by 50% of the 1% of the population who are psychopaths.

What is really amazing is that 50% of psychopaths can function well in society, without resorting to violence. This appears to be as a result of a good upbringing and the formation of ‘cognitive morality’- it would appear that attempts to form this attitude are largely unsuccessful post-childhood, because most criminal psychopaths don’t want to change. You should look up ten most popular occupations for psychopaths on YouTube. I was surprised that chef was on one list, but my brother, being a chef was not.

The use of clinical psychologists in our criminal justice systems, in combination with DNA tests and certain types of MRI scans, could completely revolutionise our systems. It could fundamentally keep our citizens more safe, for less money. In particular, putting disorderly young men into prison with psychopaths and sociopaths, probably socialises them towards greater criminality, at least if you can make the stretch to extrapolate from the Cambridge Somerville experiment.

Teenage boys with a tendency towards aggression (but no psychopathy/sociopathy), probably need a sports heavy curriculum, with a highly structured, knowledge-intensive learning program and a policy of strict enforcement of low-level discipline (such as missing out on sports and detention). When they go off the rails they need diversion, not detention, which is task focused, and exposes them to highly admirable traditional males, who can praise them for doing a good job. For young men raised without fathers, and often in circumstances where they have received nothing but criticism from adults, praise from an older male can be like catnip- they suddenly find a way of getting attention and gaining status without breaking the rules- it’s a revelation. Unfortunately our current progressive education systems in the West, are the complete opposite, in every respect.

On a related issue, I am a big fan of special forces TV programmes My dad was military. Ant Middleton former special forces soldier, chief instructor of SAS: Who Dares Wins and the man who lead an eight man team of civilians to recreate Captain Bligh’s historic voyage from outside the Great Barrier Reef to Fiji, on a small sail boat, in the show ‘Mutiny’ has made the observation that it is often ne’er do wells and disorderly types that make the best special forces soldiers. This is probably because if you flout rules, have a tendency towards aggression and a propensity for risk-taking (without a lack of empathy, so crucial for team bonding), special forces if an ideal means of gaining the status and admiration of the community at large, whilst also channelling your natural proclivities.

The current grand narrative in the US has it’s roots in the 1960s counter-culture and is typified by Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” (1980). This narrative seems to have caught on.

A new grand narrative might be Wilfred McClay’s “Land of Hope” (2019). It’s aimed at the secondary school level. I just finished it and found it to be very good.

It does seem that 30 years is the typical life span of grand narratives in the US.

“This is what political scientists call hegemony, and hate crime has become an essential tool for securing and preserving it.”

Hegemony, imbalance of power backed by law and law enforcement agencies, opens the door and mobilises all sorts of antisocial, psychopathic behaviour: intentional deceit, evidence of bad faith, violence, bullying, mobbing, etc. Psychopathy’s takeover is a common denominator of all radical movements – communism, Nazism, Islamism, progressive liberalism, etc.

As long as you promote the rights of victimised groups and eradicate dissent, you have a wide variety of choices. You can build up an academic career to indoctrinate SJWs. You can spread hate crime hoaxes working for MSM. You can punch Nazis of your choice as a member of Antifa and so on.

If you are not proactive enough, you can indulge in freeloading – claiming victimhood and social benefits, using your procreative abilities as a moneymaking exercise and voting for your progressive saviours.

However, to get a top job you have to withstand a fierce competition. You should have no empathy, be highly manipulative and ruthless – as close to the “dangerous classical psychopath [as it gets.] In essence, [you should] use both strategies – manipulation and bullying – much like historical figures such as Stalin and Hitler, individuals who surrounded themselves with obedient followers, and through them controlled much of their countries’ populations.”

What we are seeing is the gradual codification of what I would call a ‘progressive’ variant of Sharia Law: Rights and privileges assigned by appearance, gender (self-assigned, of course), creed, and wokeness. The abuse it has already engendered is terrible and likely to get orders of magnitude worse, and the worse it gets, the more violent its proponents will be and the more violent the reaction to it will be.

Nothing says progress like a bunch of white d-bags deciding how everybody else gets to feel about their shitty behavior. Quit being such crybabies – or is it only non-whites who need to toughen up?

And our president was a part of one of the ugliest, most racist displays in modern presidential history this week. Not that Quillette will speak a solitary word about this. It’s 24/7 identity politics around here, but only if you’re an aggrieved white male, apparently.

Most of these Quillette troopers are suffering from far too much internet and it seems to have seriously distorted their minds. They genuinely believe themselves to be victims of something or other. I find it hard to believe that when they walk down the street, they’ve ever been subject to verbal slurs or physical attack directed at their white heterosexual maleness.

The irony is that if they’ve been abused at all, it’s likely to have been homophobic in nature. It’s one of the most common kinds of slur that abusive men direct at other men, often for no particular reason.

Have you not considered that Trump was deliberately trolling progressives. He managed to effectively ban asylum-seeking to the US, get Nancy Pelosi and the moderate Dems to re-align in support of the least popular Democratic figures in mainstream America and push swing voters towards conservatives, all in one fell swoop. Doesn’t make his behaviour acceptable or morally right- but in a purely political sense, it was genius.

His approval ratings are higher than when he won last time, and better than most incumbent Presidents seeking a second term from the 50’s onwards. He has a war chest full of cash, and doesn’t have an opponent yet- which always boosts the incumbent, as the voters haven’t yet been forced to make the lesser of two evils comparison.

Only Andrew Yang, stands a snowballs chance in hell in beating him. Bernie might have done once- but all the Republicans really have to do is run ads showing that none of European countries Democrats love are socialist, or even democratic socialist. Every other candidate has disqualified themselves by appeasing the identitarians, that over 80% of Americans despise.

Television ruined the democratic process long before the internet arrived. It reduced complex policy issues to sound bites and spin doctoring, and raised the emotive above the power of reason for all time.

Exactly, Geary, as usual it was a troll to control the conversation. Having Democrats side with Pelosi as the Squad called her racist wasn’t good for his election prospects, he needed to get them all back on the same side.

I’m not clear on what’s racist about Trump’s tweets either. He told people who express distaste for America and who come from (or whose families come from) terribly mismanaged countries to take their stellar insights into governance there, and then to come back to the US to show them how it’s done. He wasn’t simply telling them to go home, he was telling them to put their money where their mouth is.

It’s also worth noting that many of the policies that drive this kind of hate reporting, also hurt Black British and African American artists. I was watching Claire Fox on Triggernometry, and she recounted the story of a young woman who was tried and sentenced in a British court for the unspeakable hate crime of sending a rap song with a particular N-word, which I am unable to recount for UK legal reasons, to a teenage friend. The young woman now has a criminal record and is convicted of a hate crime, has to wear an electronic tag and has a curfew order restricting her to her home outside the hours of 8.00 and 20.00- all for sending a music video.

Apparently the UK police regularly expects YouTube to remove music videos by rap artists who use offensive language. This can only harm the commercial interests of the very people the UK legal system purports to defend.

The concept of a hate crime is illogical and discriminatory. If someone attacks someone through a racist motive then is this worse than attacking them because they support the wrong football team? The loint of crimes like this is that there is no provocation or other factor which might mitigate the offence. Hate crimes should be treated more severely simply because there is no mitigating factors in that wat the arbitrary nature of selecting some invalid motives as worse tha others is avoided.

The reporting of hate crime incidents was always intended to generate propoganda which could the be used to justify further measures. This is why there is no objective element and they are entirely subjective with no criteria to determine if the designation as a hate incident is valid or not.

No one who has lived in Britain for a signifi ant period of time could actually take seriously the idea that racially motivated, homophobic crimes etc are hugely increasing it is obvious that tolerance and acceptance has massively increased.

The propoganda about hate rimes can have serious effects. The Stephen Lawrence enquiry into the abysmally bad investigatio into his murder overlooked the obvious motive of police corruption with one of the main suspect’s father a major criminal who was known to have bribed a number of police officers for the strange conclusion of instituitional racism. This tarred everyone in a large organisation with the actions of the few but covered up a significant issue of police orruption and damaged police relations with many communities for decades.

The labour party is tearing itself apart because it has been forced to define antisemitism to include criticism of Israel or in recent incidents criticism of the details of its antisemitism policy as antisemitism. No doubt genuine incidents of antisemitism occur but what has been noticeable that none of the published incidents are what would used to be understood as antisemitic. The bizarre nature of the current definitions is highlighted by criticism of jeremy corbyn as antisemitic when he met and ate witha left wing jewish anti zionist group and Chris williams for supporting a jewishmusician who has controversial opinions that israel uses the holocaust as a propganda tool to justify its actions and manipulate international opinion. When supporting jews is antisemitic the term has lost any meaning.

The term misogyny is used so widely for such innocuous comments that it has changed meaning to mean something which a woman disagrees with.

I used to be broadly supportive of preventing speech beyond certain boundaries overt racism for example but the widespread abuse of the concept of hate speech makes me beleive that only speech urging criminal actions should be prevented everything else however unpleasant and potentially dangerous has to be allowed not just legally but culturally accepted.

Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic, but criticism of Zionism is ant-Semitic- because Zionism means the promotion of Israel as a state that has the right to exist. By all means criticise Zionist groups for particular positions or policies, but don’t criticise them for being Zionist, as that, in itself, denies Jews the right to exist in a nation of their own, free from the resentment and brutality of others that has made them the most persecuted people in the history of the world.

@Geary, it’s a bit nebulous, though. I’ve thought of an example that may help to illustrate. In Israel marriage is solely the remit of religious authorities. Israeli marriages are a religious matter whether you are Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or Druze; the state only recognises marriages performed by a religious body if you have one of these religio-national groups on your Israeli ID card. Couples of mixed or no religious background often get married abroad in order to obtain a marriage licence and then hold a ceremony in Israel to solidify the union in the way they want without meeting all of the requirements for religious marriage in Israel. The government recognises common-law partnerships.

The Israeli Orthodox rabbinate will not perform marriages prohibited by Jewish law. The same too for those by Muslim clerics. Reform and Conservative Jewish marriages, as well as civil marriages performed in Israel are not recognised as legal. These ceremonies will not result in a marriage certificate since they do not take place under the auspices of the Orthodox rabbinate. Couples who wish to wed outside the authority of the government recognised religious authorities – by choice or by prohibition – must go abroad to do so.

I don’t advocate state intervention in the religions to direct them to perform rites violating their beliefs. I think criticism of the Israeli government for strictly limiting who it recognises may issue perform lawful marriages and issue marriage certificates would not meet the definition of anti-Semitism. Of course, I may be wrong and am happy to be corrected.

Now, for one more complex and murky. Is criticism (or condemnation) of newly established settlements by Zionist Jews in the West Bank anti-Semitic? I see reasonable arguments that may be made by both sides on this issue.

Lastly, I wonder if care has been taken to grasp the outcome of opposition to Zionism, the (re)establishment of a Jewish homeland, is always condemnable bigotry in the global context beyond Israel’s borders. May the Kurds claim that opposition to the creation of the Kurd state is racism? What about those Sikhs who demand to establish the Sikh homeland of Khalistan in the Punjab? Are the opponents of Khalistan perpetrators of religious-based hate? May the Boers accuse opponents of their demand to create their own state of committing racism? My question here is this: Like the Zionists, may any group that self identifies (which is of paramount importance by current standards) as a national community demand a state and also may accuse opponents of this state’s creation of a perpetrating a hateful ism?

“Is criticism (or condemnation) of newly established settlements by Zionist Jews in the West Bank anti-Semitic?”

I agree with Morgan that this position is not inherently anti-Semitic, and I’m not even sure myself if I support establishing new settlements, but it is certainly an argument used by anti-Semites as a gateway to their broader point that Israel shouldn’t exist at all.

“May the Kurds claim that opposition to the creation of the Kurd state is racism?”

I think the difference between Israel and those examples is that Israel exists already. I don’t think anti-Zionism was inherently a racist position before Israel was founded, but once it was (and certainly 70 years later), it’s existence must be accepted. The only way I can imagine a rejection of Israel’s right to exist not being predicated in anti-Semitism is if someone has a reasoned argument for why all borders should have stopped changing at a particular year (pre-Israeli independence), is equally vocal about the rejection of states founded and territory changing hands after that date, and condemns each state proportionally to the amount of land seized or population displaced.

By this metric, someone who condemns Israel but not Pakistan (founded only 9 months earlier) for a much larger land grab and actual ethnic cleansing of millions of people that resulted in Pakistan being 99.9 % Muslim is probably operating out of either ignorance of history or anti-Semitic bias.

For what it’s worth, I support Kurdish independence, because they too have been the victims of persecution and genocide under the leadership of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. I don’t know much about the Sikh claim, but generally I favour regional self-determination. A free Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan should be geopolitical priorities given China’s expansionist aspirations.

On that note, people condemning Israeli treatment of Palestinians who are not much more vocal about the Chinese Communist Party putting a million Muslims in concentration camps and creating the most sophisticated surveillance state in the world in Xinjiang cannot be considered honest advocates of Muslim human rights.

“For what it’s worth, I support Kurdish independence, because they too have been the victims of persecution and genocide under the leadership of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.”

Does one have to prove a base level of persecution before they have the right to create an independent state for themselves?

White Americans of Northern European Christian descent can’t prove much persecution at the hands of non-Christians, but does that mean that they have no right to create an independent state for white people of Northern European Christian descent?

I would like to think their right is as strong as that of the Kurds, despite any quibbling about how much persecution each has suffered. (It’s not a contest, after all.)

@Morgan No, although the motives for making the criticism may be complex and murky, and often deceitful.

Re motives, sometimes these are difficult to discern, especially if it’s a person who is unknown to us. Further, at times we discern a stranger’s motives by relying on the better known motives of unrelated people because the stranger’s comment strikes us as similar.

Whether or not criticism of Zionist settlements is anti-Semitic seems to be to be up in the air because even Zionists themselves have split on the issue.

“By definition, Zionism means support for the State of Israel.But for Liberal/ Progressive Zionists, primarily Reform and Reconstructionist leaders, academics and communal leaders in North America, and many secular Israelis, that does not include Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, the “settlements.”

Although traditional Zionism is based on the right of the Jewish people to rebuild a homeland in Eretz Yisrael/Palestine and support for the establishment of the State of Israel, Liberal/Progressive Zionists have quite literally drawn the line – the one that was part of the armistice agreements of 1949 which Israel signed with Jordan, Egypt and Syria.

The Six Day War in 1967 changed the map when the IDF conquered the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and eastern Jerusalem.

Winning the war was a Zionist achievement, but occupying conquered territory was more problematic, and when Jews began to establish communities there, questions were raised regarding their legitimacy.” […]

This leads to the possibility of an opponent of West Bank Zionist settlements being accused of anti-Semitism by religions Zionists and not accused of anti-Semitism by Liberal/ Progressive Zionists. Who’s definition of anti-Semitism prevails?

Does one have to prove a base level of persecution before they have the right to create an independent state for themselves?

Great question. And I agree with your answer. It had me recall the recent uproar by the LGBT community over the call for a straight pride parade in Boston. Reading the objections, I found again and again the opponents kept associating pride with enduring/overcoming oppression. No other reason for being proud was worthy of consideration. The LGBT community commenting on the sites I read was adamant that only their very limited definition was acceptable and any other were an declared insulting to them. If identity is now (exclusively) determined by one’s own perceived oppression, it seems to me that a likely outcome is the declaration that some identities are invalid, as has been seen said of whites by some anti-white extremists, or racists if you prefer.

Agreed, but irrespective of China’s expansionism I think they have the right to self determination. But what about Manchuria? Here you’ll find large numbers of Manchus, Koreans, and Han Chinese all mixed together, and each claiming the same significant geologic formations such as mountains and volcanos sacred. Many (South) Koreans assert that Manchuria was once the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, a kingdom prior to Guryeo from which the name Korea is derived – South Koreans call their own country Han Gook (literary the Hans’ country, but this Han is different from the Han Chinese) and North Koreans call their country Chosun. Upon normalisation of ties between China and S. Korea, many Korean nationalists moved to Manchuria to begin to (re)instill Korean identify and national solidarity with the local Korea community, and this caused all kinds of trouble between the two governments because Beijing accused these activists of fomenting ‘splitism’, which is a serious crime (capital?) in China. I think we can find similar mixed territories around the world. How is this situation to be handled?

Further, what about claims that most find batty but whose adherents forcefully advocate? Take a look at this map. I’ll assume you don’t read Korean, but you can locate the Korean peninsula and Japan on it. The large blue territory is Goguryeo and is what’s claimed by hyper nationalists. Look at Europe and Anatolia. That blue smear is West Goguryeo – that’s Korean too. Concurrent to Goguryeo’s existence there were other Korean kingdoms. The green one is Baekche. Not only is it in southwestern Korea, it’s also a large part of China, much of Japan, and the Incan Empire. The magenta sections of the map are the Shilla Kingdom. Not only is it the southeastern part of Korea, it’s also all of Arabia, Egypt, Madagascar, and England. Imagine my astonishment when I learnt that I’m Korean. 😉

Yes, this Korea claim strikes us an outlandish, but Korea isn’t the only place were such claims exist. If we accept the progressive belief that asserted identify is true (for the oppressed) and their claims must be recognised as just, this opens up the opportunity for many groups to exploit it, which may lead to a lot of turbulence and worse. Do we draw a line in history somewhere?

@Geary Johansen” criticism of Zionism is ant-Semitic- because Zionism means the promotion of Israel as a state that has the right to exist.”

Every individual has a right to exist and to be treated with equal respect but no group has an absolute right to a state still less to be immune from criticism of the creation or maintainance of that state. Is it racist to object to the creation of a kurdish state, or to campaign against scottish independance, or to object to the creation of an islamic caliphate? A mere half century before the formation of Israel as a state Jews were a tiny minority within what was then palestine. Surely the exisiting inhabitants had every right to object to the formation of Israel without being described as racists. A campaign to expel Jews from their current homes would be a disgusing racist endeavour, a campaign for the formation of a non-religous secular state for palestinians and Israelis would be utopian and naive but inherently non-racist while being anti-zionist. The difference is how the individuals are treated, individuals have rights, religons do not.

What does seem inherently racist is the elevation of the rights of Israeli jews above every other national and religous group to the extent that normal criticism applied to every other state and religon is forbidden.

There’s no question anymore as to the ploys and motivations of the left. What remains is to dutifully and consistently expose it for the nonsense that it is. There are still many millions who are in the dark, beguiled, and don’t understand what is going on.

Hope Not Hate is the British equivalent of the SPLC. It performs a similar role, although the SPLC is obviously a larger and wealthier operation. It has produced similar smear documents attacking people like Melanie Phillips, for instance.

The article observes that hate crimes now exist as political crimes. This is what they have always been – hate crimes specifically render certain motives criminal, which numerous philosophers have observed is weird for the liberal state, which largely prides itself on avoiding declarations of virtues and vices. Hate crimes have always been political crimes, aimed at criminalising certain behaviour and motives. Notably they only apply to certain protected classes and not anything else, which is just weird. They have no place in the modern liberal state.

Jussie Smollett is the textbook example of this. His privilege derives not from being black or gay, but from the fact he has an impeccable background and connections which shields him from scrutiny. His mother’s Communist links and his own radical political ties are given little mention in mainstream media.

Quite aside from the substantive issues discussed here, I am appalled at the expression “Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. The term “Muslimness” grates on my nerves. I modestly propose that for the sake of euphony, henceforth the term “Muslimosity” be used in all official documents.

Did a whole article on hate in the UK without the mention where it mainly starts and is seasoned. At the University. Don’t want to be all snow flakey but try walking across the learned lanes of SOAS, Manchester, Southampton, and Exeter and being identified as “Zionist”..aka as Jewish. The Leftist Islamist alliance of love will take good care of you.